The first episode is crazy fast paced, has great battle scenes, characters you think will be around for ages dying all over the place, amazing beards, and set up the series very well.

I was pretty surprised by this. Didn't think it was going to span 20 years in the first episode. That's actually quite an impressive amount of back-story, considering the characters [as you said] seemed like important characters that were going to be the focus of the story.

Show seems pretty aggressive so far, especially those post-war celebrations.

I was quite surprised that unlike most shows, when they did a time skip the girls actually got uglier. Usually the little girls time skip into sexy models but this one decided to cast a couple mingers instead (while the guy became orlando bloom).

The viking scenes reminded me a lot of 'how to train your dragon' but with less 'DONK!'s and more beheadings.